Module 1 - Task 2a: Reflective Practice

The concept of a journal has always been one that has puzzled me. In my very first post for the course I expressed a discordance for keeping a blog for personal use. I stated not finding the idea of keeping one to be particularly resourceful, logging close and delicate thoughts and putting them before an audience. I felt it be could be particularly damaging for an individual to pour such ideas so publicly by pretence of it being treated as an online diary. A key difference between a physical and web 2.0 journal is the level of creator/consumer participation. It is this relationship that has actually shifted my opinion on the matter since starting the course. I also spoke in my first blog about the opportunity web 2.0 technology allows in creating a platform for communities to share a common interest in e.g. the arts. Since being enrolled on the course, I have found myself plenty a time looking at tutor’s and student’s blogs for inspiration with tasks, layout design and generally all things BAPP. It is from this perspective of thinking that I have discovered something crucially important about blogging as a form. The creator writes and expresses their thoughts via a more tangible medium (blogging as compared to private journals) for consumer participation i.e. the online audience. Like the actor, expected (you would hope) to enjoy their practice, they ultimately do not play the role in that play to boast how talented and good they look on stage but to instead provide their audience with a truthful and honest account of a character, looking only to serve the best intentions of the written material. This is what makes worthy of an audience’s time and attention, initiated to the material or not. It is a similar experience with blogging. The creator can find it useful as a form of therapy but its ability to gauge an audience in such a way to spark a dialogue within themselves is a much more rewarding prospect.

Jessica (http://jessicaplant.blogspot.co.uk) left a very humbling comment on an earlier post of mine concerning 2D images and audio-visual. Readers can look at her exact comment themselves should they wish but she was basically identifying with my impressions on using moving image as a method to analyse and critically assess a practitioner’s work. She mentioned that this was an approach she found beneficial and could potentially incorporate into her own practice when teaching. This response is arguably the most rewarding factor, one that differentiates the blog from the private journal, the ability for the consumer to be inspired from what they’ve seen. The consumer absorbs the information and looks to produce it in their own work, thus successfully forming a creator/consumer relationship.

Part two of the module encourages that a private journal be kept in order to document day-to-day practice in whatever capacity we see fit, but by paying close attention to the way in which we choose to record our activities in the process. I feel that I am already exploring reflection in my blog posts through varying methods of demonstration. Whether that be the recount of previous professional experience in relation to a task or including diagrams detailing exercises carried out during module sessions, I feel that all attempts thus far have only strengthened cases I have been making.

 

My only real experiences of keeping journals have been directly related to my professional practice e.g. a character research scrapbook for a role or notes taken and compiled together from a singing lesson. The notion of keeping and attending to a journal on a regular basis on top of other tasks for the course is one that unnerves me slightly. This isn’t for fear of chronicling and being forced to look outwardly at my current activities, professional or not, it is more the time involved in keeping it up. I would say I already put aside a substantial amount of hours a week in order to focus on the course. It is something I am thinking about daily and, to the best of my ability, try to make a priority around other events. I would also say I spend a copious amount of time crafting my blog posts to be the best they can be. I’m wary as to how much I’m writing for each task and while I could understand someone’s opinion that I’m waffling too much, it is only a result of my tenacity to answer and develop ideas in as full a capacity as I can. I may choose to keep my journal informal and less structured as it will be more for my own eyes only, for now at least. I’m aware that a lot of students on the course have already completed part two so I will be looking to see how they approached the tasks and what styles of reflection they found to work best for them in comparison to my own.